Commentary 8

Thoughts.

• The old "freedom of religion"="freedom of worship", thing, so popular among the Soviets and other Communist regimes, and occasionally pressed into service by pretty much all leftists everywhere ever since, is fascinatingly ill-suited to the religions of the peoples it was first tried on. Telling a Russian Orthodox or a Polish Catholic he's free to worship as he wants on Sunday is to completely miss the point; do you know how much of those people's lives was determined by their religion? The same goes for the Buddhism the Chinese tried it on, which does not actually, per se, "worship" anyone or anything, but has a whole hell of a lot of religious requirements all the same.
  
  Amusingly, the only people "freedom of worship" has any meaning for, would be Protestants, and to a somewhat lesser extent Muslims. It's also amusing to note how we're always being told that, e.g., Native American religions govern the whole of their adherents' lives (it's true—tell a Navajo he's got "freedom of worship" and he'll point out his "worship" consists entirely of keeping his ancestral law, his invocation of the gods being restricted to emergencies), rather than just one day a week? The same is true of Catholics and the Orthodox; but in our case, it's generally portrayed as a bad thing.
• Why do people think that scientists would be the best people to have deal with aliens, at first contact? Maybe anthropologists, but really, there's very few scientists of any discipline I'd let witness my will, let alone represent me before aliens.
  
  Unfortunately, if there were to be first contact negotiations here, rather than out in space somewhere, the only people who could do it are, well, politicians. I know, horrible thought, but representing their people before potentially hostile aliens is actually their job—whether the alien is another tribe or another species is essentially immaterial. They'd also be the only people with the authority to negotiate in our behalf—scientists do not have that right.
  
  Of course, my mama didn't raise no fools; you would have scientists advising the politicians who represent us. Let's just hope they do a better job than most scientists who advise politicians.
• If I needed another reason to self-publish, there's the fact my first SF book is 213,775 words long. Or in other words, 2,184 words longer than Crime and Punishment (depending on translation). Generally speaking, when you get into Dostoevsky country, no mainstream publisher will give you the time of day. (Also, Moby Dick is 206,052 words, but while I've got some info-dumps—I dislike SF that doesn't—they're not in the same league, hell, they ain't playing the same sport, as Melville's.)
  
  Then again, I'm downright terse compared to Ayn Rand—Atlas Shrugged is 561,996 words, while the Fountainhead is 311,596. Steinbeck's East of Eden is 225,395 words, and I guarantee you more things happen in mine (does a baby die and a woman breastfeed a grown man—Steinbeck motifs—in that one?).
• Know what's fascinating? People apparently really do think Fahrenheit 451 is about censorship. Silly creatures. The books is a rant against television, and mass culture in general—the firemen burn books not for the sake of some political censorship, but to make sure nobody deviates from the same spoonfed pop culture as their neighbors.
  
  Understand, your precious internet, with its brainless memes and its enshrinement of mindless celebrities, is far closer to what that book was an attack on than the specter of "censorship" you try to use it against.
• I must change something in my third SF book: before, I'd had the gal who grew up on Chinese stations refer to a ship as a yíngke, "firefly"—24th-century Chinese stationer slang for "crappy ship with an incompetent crew". It ought to to have been yìhngfóchùhng—"firefly" again, but this time in Cantonese, not Mandarin. All the other Chinese I have her speak is Cantonese, though most of the martial-arts and philosophical terms, and Chinese star names, are in Mandarin.
  
  However, I'm taking that out, however much fun it may be to have Take Thats to Firefly—the context is people being arrested for having a ship without a trained engineer, because in the real world Mal would be charged with the first ever OSHA crime against humanity, for hiring Kaylee. But I realized, nobody in my setting could do something that stupid, because my setting is realistic, and nobody not a government or rich enough to constitute a one-man sovereign state has their own ships. And none of those people would hire Kaylee, having, as they do, a rudimentary understanding of the differences between a fusion rocket and a '68 Chevy.
• Do you know the answer to the question "Did the American revolutionaries have British accents?" I do. Namely, "No, but the Redcoats had American ones." That's oversimplifying a bit, but what we think of as a "British" accent pretty much came into being starting a generation or two after the Americans seceded. In the 18th century, most Englishmen had what would sound to us like an American (or perhaps Canadian) accent—which is also why Canadian English sounds more like American than it does like "British".
  
  In the early 19th century, certain dialects of Southern English began to be considered "proper" by the ruling class; this prestige dialect is the ancestor of modern Received Pronunciation (which shades through Estuary into Cockney). The mid-19th century form of Cockney, on the other hand, is the ancestor of Australian and South African English. You can observe several trends in how, e.g., New Englanders and Canadians, on the one hand, and Australians and South Africans, on the other, pronounce certain words—because of when they were colonized.
• One often hears actors or other people involved in drama saying that some character is basically their dad. Hugh Laurie, for instance, has said that it's kinda weird how much money he makes basically pretending to be a jerk version of his father.
  
  But know who's got the weirdest story like that? Dan Aykroyd. Know what movie he plays his dad in? Ghostbusters.
  
  His family have been big in ghost-related affairs since the days of the Cottingley fairies. If you noticed that the parapsychology-technobabble in those movies sounded remarkably good (I know I did), that would be why.